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Sydewynder

Sydewynder is an SMS receiver and sender module written in Python for S60 phones (e.g. Nokia N80). It can automate the responses of messages, and may be used as a mobile application server in areas where setting up a traditional server may be difficult or illegal.

Sydewynder is an open-source SMS receiver and sender application written in Python for the Nokia S60 phones. It can automate the responses of messages and can be used as a mobile application server in areas where setting up a traditional server may be difficult or illegal. It also is very useful for prototyping mobile applications, such as games, without the burden of expensive hosting. As such, it works very well in educational settings. It even includes an emulator for developing scripts off of the phones.

The Sydewynder Logo

Sydewynder requires the latest version of Python for the S60 (>= 1.4.0). If you are using earlier version of PyS60, please update your phone with the latest software.

To install Sydewynder, copy the contents inside the "sydewynder-x.x" directory into the E:\Python\ directory on your S60 phone (this should be the memory card). Sydewynder comes with "Pig Latin", "Ask Tom Cruise", and "We Feel Fine" as example scripts, as well as arcade.py, which will run all of them from a single server instance. Feel free to look at how the files are constructed and modify them for your own purposes. Pay special attention to the comments, as they will make developing new apps for Sydewynder much easier.

Scripts developed off-phone can be run like any other Python script if the syde_emu.py module is in the same directory. When you run your script from the command line, a crude emulator will appear and guide you through a typical interaction between cell phone users and the Sydewynder app you have created.

This project was featured on the front page of the CDT department website.

It was also part of Paul Notzold's Ask Tom piece, which was on display at the Chelsea Art Museum for the Parsons 10 Years Running show. Participants were asked to text a question to a number and received back a random (or is it?!) quote from a famous celebrity whose name rhymes with Bomb Booze. The phone "server" running Sydewynder stayed up for about two weeks straight without much of a problem.

If you're using Sydewynder, be sure to drop a comment on the Sourceforge forum and let us know what you've done with it. And be sure to post there if you need help or run into any bugs.

Sydewynder is copyright 2007 Mike Edwards and is licensed to you under the GPL version 2.0. "Ask Tom" was developed with Paul Notzold. "We Feel Fine" uses the amazing wefeelfine.org API to work its magic.

Another fascinating day at DIMEA 2008. One of the keynotes, by the Greek artist Michalou(di)s, described sculpting using silica aerogel. It's an incredibly light insulator, but it also has a strange "immaterial" beauty to it, like looking into a cloud. Very cool. I also saw presentations on AI painting, biometric sensing art (right up my alley), and a very cool haptic device that rests on the nail of the finger, but makes the user feel like their touching something in the front.

It's about 4:30 local time--I swear I was tired when I got back here. Oh, well.

The conference is going really well. The presentations so far have been just fantastic--I've seen some great stuff for big games, locative media and pervasive computing. I was especially pleased to see Annika Waern and Josephine Reid present their respective papers--I've read about their other projects, so it's great to see the latest work.

I've made it to the conference in one piece--fortunately I was waiting for the bus early. I don't present until Friday, so I have the next few days to soak it all in. The list of presenters and demos looks pretty good, too, so I think I'll come out of this with some interesting new precedents to think about. Keynote's in ten minutes, so I'm off.

So I finally arrived in Athens. The Galini Hotel, while not exactly a "palace", is nice with a great view of the sea and a mini bar stocked with reasonably priced mineral water. That was especially key when I first got here. I missed my stop by a good margin and had to trudge back here in the heat of the in my suit jacket, wheelie bag in tow. Feh--I need to improve my ability to transliterate Greek. At any rate, I'm settled and rehydrated and due for a nap. More later.

I presented an overview of the Sydewynder application to Sven Travis's Creativity and Computation lecture class today. I've attached the PowerPoint and PDF below (and an OpenDocument presentation can be posted, if anybody wants that).

Also, I've released Sydewynder 0.1.1, which has the option to take screenshots of the apps as they run (useful for putting together the presentation) and a new "Round Robin" sample app that shows how to send a single SMS messages to multiple recipients and multiple messages to several recipient lists.

The latest version of Sydewynder, our mobile application server for the S60, has been released! With Sydewynder, any S60 phone, like the Nokia N80, can become an automated SMS gateway. You can grab version 0.1 off of the SourceForge site.

This new version features:

scripts can now connect to WiFi, making Internet-enabled responses possible!

emulator for off-phone development. Now students don't need to have a phone to develop mobile apps for it

two tabbed pane view for logging and status indicators

start up screen -- very pretty!

a much better UI

a new example application using WiFi - "We Feel Fine". It taps into the wefeelfine.org API

And these bugs were fixed:

recipients in the address book could not receive text message responses

unicode text problems

Much thanks for Sven, Colleen, Chuck, Eric, Albert, and Chloe for their support, ideas, and code.

During the winter break of 2006-2007, Chris Hennelly and I spent a bunch of free time working on the Spy in the Lab project. The Spy was supposed to go to our friends at Tsinghua University and peek in on all the stuff they were doing. It didn't quite make it for that semester, but we got it working pretty close to 100% by the time we were done with break.